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In 1966, the NAACP of Claiborne County, Mississippi launched a boycott of several white-owned local businesses on the basis of racial discrimination.

It was so impactful that the local hardware store filed a lawsuit against the individuals and organizations who coordinated the boycott. After 10 long years of litigation, the Mississippi Supreme Court ruled in favor of the white businesses and ordered the NAACP to pay for all their lost earnings.

Years later, in 1982, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 8-0 to overturn the lower court’s decision on the basis that nonviolent boycotts are a form of free speech protected by the First Amendment. In announcing the unanimous decision, Justice John Paul Stevens said, “One of the foundations of our society is the right of individuals to combine with other persons in pursuit of a common goal by lawful means.”

That should have been the end of it. But now, Americans’ right to boycott is under attack once again — thanks to a vicious anti-boycott bill making its way through the Senate.

In particular, it appears to target the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement. BDS is an international movement calling on individuals, institutions, and governments to boycott Israeli products until it ends its occupation of Palestinian lands. The boycott is explicitly nonviolent and is supported by activists, celebrities, faith-based groups, and political and social justice organizations around the world.

The proposed Israel Anti-Boycott Act would make it a felony for Americans to support BDS, with a penalty of up to $ 1 million and 20 years in prison.

Unfortunately, the bill enjoys bipartisan support: 32 Republicans and 15 Democrats are currently signed on as cosponsors, including party leaders like Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Claire McCaskill (D-MO), and Ted Cruz (R-TX). In response, the ACLU issued a letter urging members of the Senate to oppose the bill based on its “direct violation of the First Amendment.” (Following the publication of the ACLU’s letter, several members of Congress have agreed to review their sponsorship, but so far none have removed their names.)

The Israel Anti-Boycott Act would function by amending an earlier law from 1979, which prohibits American citizens and corporations from complying with boycotts called for by foreign nations against U.S. allies. The new law would include boycotts “fostered and imposed by international governmental organizations” like the United Nations. In this, it’s a direct response to the 2016 UN Human Rights Council resolution discouraging businesses from operating in Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem.

In one way, it’s genius. By claiming a connection between BDS and the UN — a connection the UN has never embraced, in that resolution or any other — the bill attempts to work around NAACP v. Claiborne Hardware Co.

But the BDS movement is not a product of the UN — it has nothing to do with it at all, except to the degree that it’s based on international law. The BDS call to action was issued in 2005 by a coalition of 170 Palestinian political parties, professional associations, refugee networks, and civil society organizations. BDS is a tactic, not an organization, and the boycott has always been grassroots and decentralized, meaning anyone anywhere can partake in BDS by making the simple decision to do so.

Whether the congressional supporters of the Israel Anti-Boycott Act misunderstand or are intentionally misrepresenting BDS is uncertain, but the Supreme Court decision of 1982 is clear as crystal: Americans’ right to peaceful boycott with the aim to “bring about political, social, and economic change” is protected by the First Amendment. That means this bill is more than egregiously immoral — it’s unconstitutional.

The bill’s language also lumps Israel’s settlements in with the country’s internationally recognized borders.

Significantly, it declares the UN Human Rights Council’s 2016 position on Israeli settlements an “action to boycott, divest from, or sanction Israel.” Yet that resolution took no position on the boycotting of goods produced in Israel proper — it only took aim at Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory, which are illegal under international law.

U.S. policy since 1979 has recognized that the Israeli settlements are “inconsistent with international law.” By contrast, the new bill effectively erases any distinction between Israel and its settlements in the West Bank. If it’s passed, anyone who chooses not to do business with or buy items manufactured in illegal Israeli settlements can be convicted, fined, and even jailed.

Efforts to curb this kind of activism are often touted as efforts to combat anti-Semitism. Yet polls show that only 17 percent of American Jews support the continued construction of settlements. The bill is so controversial, in fact, that the liberal pro-Israel organization J Street, which has long opposed BDS, recently announced its opposition to the proposed law on the basis that it “divides [opponents of the global BDS movement] by making the issue about the settlements.”

It’s difficult to know exactly how broadly the law, if passed, will be enforced. Its intentionally vague language leaves a lot to the imagination, and perhaps that’s exactly what’s intended. The real goal may be to frighten people from engaging in the completely legal act of living out their values in their economic choices.

But we can’t let fear prevent us from exercising our rights and fulfilling our moral obligations. The silver lining is that every effort to quell the BDS movement has served to strengthen it. Each attempt at criminalizing the boycott, whether on the state or federal level, has been met with a spike in Google searches for BDS and related terms.

And with the uproar caused by this new bill, the right-wing pro-Israel lobby just may prove to be the BDS movement’s best ally.

I’m in the process of buying a house in the Station North Arts and Entertainment District of Baltimore. Here’s what the listing has to say about my house: “This modern rehab is close to everything Station North Arts and Entertainment District has to offer. Walk to restaurants, Charles Theater, various entertainment venues, coffee shops — it is all here.”

Baltimore’s arts scene was a major reason I moved to Baltimore, and a major reason for choosing the Station North neighborhood. But while my listing talked up the arts, it said nothing about the artists.

Artists have certainly left their mark on Station North, and my partner and I certainly look forward to patronizing the businesses they run. But the organically developed communal live-work spaces that play such a vital role in helping make Baltimore an arts mecca are an endangered species.

In fact, there’s another listing down the street that’s a little out of my price range: the Bell Foundry, for sale for $ 1 million.

You may remember the Bell Foundry from last winter, when its tenants were suddenly evicted by the city in the wake of a tragic fire in an Oakland, Calif., live-work warehouse that killed 29 people. More than one Bell Foundry tenant subsequently became homeless, joining the 7,500 other Baltimoreans evicted in 2016 — one in 17 renter households.

Virtually every week, politicians and journalists and policy experts attempt the impossible: mind reading. Specifically, they want to know what’s going on inside one man’s mind. They want to know what Kim Jong Un is thinking and, more importantly, what he wants.

It’s impossible to know for sure what another person is thinking. And yet figuring out what the current North Korean leader wants – in the absence of any substantial engagement with him – is the basis of all policy options for how to address the country. These policy options fall into three main categories: military force, non-military force, and diplomacy.

According to one interpretation, Kim Jong Un is fundamentally irrational, so there is no point in trying to negotiate with him. He only understands force. Unfortunately, this is a rather popular misconception.

Even some hardliners who oppose negotiations with North Korea acknowledge that Kim Jong Un has some rational goals. For instance, they believe that the North Korean leader is interested in his own political survival and that of his regime. They believe that he wants to accumulate hard currency, maintain not just the survival of the regime but its ideological and international legitimacy, and defend the sovereignty of the country at all costs including with the use of nuclear weapons.

These hardliners who believe that Kim Jong Un operates according to a certain narrow rationality also favor an approach to North Korea that emphasizes sticks. But they tend to support economic sanctions, in addition to conventional military containment, to force Kim Jong Un to make a rational assessment that maintenance of an aggressive nuclear program will make it difficult to achieve these other goals.

Those who believe that diplomatic engagement is the most effective approach to North Korea must also come up with some understanding of what Kim Jong Un wants. After all, you can’t just say that the North Korean leader wants peace. Or that diplomacy is always a better option than war or economic sanctions. Neither of these positions can persuade governments to sit down with North Korean representatives.

So, here is my attempt to read Kim Jong Un’s mind in an effort to come up with an effective diplomatic alternative.

I also believe that the North Korean leader is focused on his own political survival. He has spent his first years in power consolidating his position by eliminating potential rivals. In this way, he is his grandfather’s grandson: Kim Il Sung also eliminated all potential sources of opposition to his authority. Like his grandfather, Kim Jong Un connects regime stability directly to his own security as leader.

I also think that Kim Jong Un, like his father and grandfather, believes that the key to the future longevity of North Korea lies in negotiating a deal with the United States.

North Korea has always been uncomfortable about becoming too dependent on China, going all the way back to the Korean War and even earlier. The entire North Korean ideology of juche is essentially a repudiation of an age-old dependency – the tributary relationship of sadaejuui of the Korean peninsula to the Chinese emperor. Moreover, Kim Il Sung built the North Korean state as a fundamentally anti-Japanese country – a repudiation of Japanese colonial occupation – so any relationship with Tokyo can only go so far (and not very far at all during the Shinzo Abe era). Finally, although Pyongyang seeks occasional economic advantage from Seoul, the fundamental competition for control of the peninsula makes any grand deal with South Korea – at least now when the two sides have such wildly divergent economic success – very unlikely.

That leaves the United States.

According to Pyongyang’s worldview, the United States holds the key to North Korea’s future. Only Washington can provide North Korea with the kind of diplomatic recognition it wants at the international level. Only Washington can decrease the military containment of North Korea. And only Washington can make the decision, ultimately, to end North Korea’s economic isolation.

Kim Jong Un wants to lessen his country’s dependency on countries in the region. He wants to push through an economic reform – greater reliance on market mechanisms, more investments in technology, even shifting resources from the military to the non-military sectors – that can strengthen the country’s independence and give it greater leverage in dealing with the outside world.

To date, North Koreans have created their own version of a market economy from the ground up, while the state has entered the global economy on its own terms through black market trade (in various contraband goods) and connecting with international banks (by hacking into them).

Any deal with North Korea must provide the things that the regime wants: capital to rebuild the economy and make the reforms work plus a legitimate relationship with the global economy that can substitute for the largely illegitimate set of ties it currently has.

Of course, North Korea doesn’t just want capital in exchange for its nukes. It wants security guarantees as well. One step in this direction is, of course, a peace treaty that can replace the armistice of the Korean War. But honestly, I don’t think that the North Korea leadership will see a piece of paper as the ultimate substitute for nuclear weapons.

To provide North Korea with that kind of guarantee, any deal must accept a gradual period that phases out the country’s nuclear program. As it whittles down its program, North Korea will have the chance to see if its negotiating partners keep to the agreement (lifting sanctions, providing North Korean banks with training to meet international standards, signing a peace agreement, and so on). Perhaps North Korea will retain a “recessed deterrence” of some nuclear material that can, if necessary, be weaponized in the case of an emergency (much like Japan’s capability).

Such is the basis of a hard-nosed engagement deal. It’s not an easy moral issue. Frankly, I’d love to see both Kim Jong Un and Donald Trump put in jail some day, just like former South Korean president Park Geun Hye. But sometimes you have to choose peace over justice. And the threat of war on the Korean peninsula demands that two otherwise despicable leaders from Pyongyang and Washington talk to each other and figure out a way to give each other what the other one wants.

The chairmen of the Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal watchdog agency over Wall Street and the corporations that trade on it, have been a varied lot down through the years. Some have been public-spirited champions of average investors. Others have put their priority on keeping Corporate America’s high and mighty happy. The current SEC chair — on an acting basis — most definitely falls in the latter category.

President Donald Trump named Michael Piwowar to the acting chair slot shortly after his inauguration. Piwowar, one of the SEC’s five commissioners since 2013, quickly flexed his acting chair muscles — on one of the agency’s most high-profile recent decisions.

Back in August 2015, an SEC commissioner majority had approved a long-awaited set of regulations for enforcing an innovative 2010 Dodd-Frank Act provision on corporate pay disparities. The provision requires corporations to annually disclose the ratio between their CEO and median worker compensation.

Piwowar fiercely opposed the new disclosure rule, but found himself outvoted, and the disclosure mandate officially went into effect January 1. Corporations are now preparing to calculate their first required ratio disclosures. These first required ratios will go public early in 2018.

Or so everyone expected until early last month when acting chair Piwowar threw a monkey-wrench into the works. Corporations the nation over, the acting chair pronounced, “have begun to encounter unanticipated compliance difficulties.” These “unexpected challenges,” Piwowar continued, justified still another public comment period on the ratio rule, and he proceeded to invite stakeholders to share their beefs about their new burden.

That invitation, Piwowar no doubt expected, would bring forth incredibly moving corporate testimonies that would vindicate his opposition to disclosing pay ratios. A nation suitably impressed by these tales of corporate woe would surely then understand why the SEC must never allow CEO-worker pay ratios to see the light of day.

The deadline for Piwowar’s invitation to submit new comments on pay-ratio disclosure came earlier this week. The tsunami of corporate tales of woe that Piwowar expected? That didn’t come. What did: a deep torrent of responses — from experts and grassroots business circles alike — supporting pay-ratio disclosure and demanding that Piwowar end his silly stalling stunt and start enforcing the law.

Count Lynne Dallas, a law professor at the University of San Diego, is one of those experts. She pointed out in her detailed response to Piwowar’s request for comments that almost seven years have passed since the Dodd-Frank Act wrote the pay-ratio disclosure mandate into law. Firms now complaining that they’ve “begun to encounter” difficulties had plenty of time to get their ducks in order.

Another expert, Iowa State University professor of accounting Sue Ravenscroft, noted in her analysis that corporations have claimed repeatedly that the cost of calculating pay ratios would be “extraordinarily onerous.” That claim, she observed, rates as “downright laughable.”

All companies, Ravenscroft explained, give employees individual tax forms and report on individual employees whenever remitting withholding taxes to the government. No corporations should have any problem compiling this “readily available information” on worker pay.

Comments from the businessgrassroots shared this expert displeasure over Piwowar’s maneuvering to ditch pay-ratio disclosure.

“I am disappointed that you are reconsidering this rule,” wrote Gina Webber, a small business owner. “I believe the rule should be kept and ENFORCED. Trump, in his campaign, denounced outrageous CEO pay, so it would be quite hypocritical if this Administration undermined CEO pay transparency.”

Another local businessperson, general contractor Mark Urban, stressed in his response the vital importance of encouraging narrower pay gaps between executives and employees.

“As a business owner,” he told the SEC, “having a low disparity between CEO and workers pay is critical to success of a company.”

Other Americans with business experience dismissed the standard corporate rationalizations for opposing the SEC pay-ratio disclosure rule.

“I have read some of the comments submitted by corporate officers who, not at all surprisingly, oppose the rule, largely on the stated grounds of compliance burden and expense,” observed Robert Conklin. “Based on my 45 years experience in two careers, first as a securities lawyer and later as CEO of a small privately held corporation, I believe that such burdens and costs are being greatly exaggerated.”

Piwowar’s move to reopen the ratio-disclosure debate also brought feedback — and push back — from public interest and investor groups. In a joint March 22 letter, over 100 unions, pension funds, state treasurers, and consumer advocacy organizations called the new SEC disclosure regulations a “thoughtful, balanced, and carefully crafted” rule that “will provide material information to investors.”

Lawmakers have chimed in, too. In one letter to Piwowar, eight U.S. senators describe themselves as “extremely troubled” by his latest attempt to “discredit” the new ratio rule and “generate momentum to repeal” it.

Piwowar’s stab at creating that “momentum,” adds Sarah Anderson of the Institute for Policy Studies, has clearly blown up in his face. As of March 22, only four companies had bothered to “share their problems” with pay-ratio disclosure on the SEC’s online comments page.

The momentum globally, Anderson adds, is clearly running toward requirements that corporations reveal their executive-worker pay ratios. India is already enforcing pay-ratio disclosure, and in the UK even the current conservative prime minister, Theresa May, supports the idea.

Back in the United States, meanwhile, the city of Portland has enacted an ordinance that ties corporate tax rates to corporate pay ratios, and a number of other localities — and states — are considering similar measures, all inspired by the Dodd-Frank ratio disclosure mandate.

Acting SEC chairman Piwowar could continue to delay that mandate’s enforcement. But he has absolutely no mandate from the American people, everyone can now see clearly, to keep stalling.

Sam Pizzigati is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Cheerleaders for concentrated wealth have a new reason to cheer. They have chanced upon a fresh rationalization for inequality.

This new rationalization comes from an unlikely source, a sober and thoughtful just-published book from a distinguished historian and classicist, Stanford’s Walter Scheidel.

In The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century, Scheidel builds upon his considerable academic expertise on the ancient world and explores how and when societies have actually become less unequal. In the process, he has brought forth a book that could hardly be more profoundly depressing.

Scheidel’s basic thesis: Down through history, only “massive and violent disruptions of the established order” have generated “big equalizing moments.”

“It is almost universally true,” he advises, “that violence has been necessary to ensure the redistribution of wealth at any point in time.”

The violence that Scheidel details has taken various forms over the millennia, from war and plagues to revolutions and utter collapses of civil authority. All this violence has exacted a heavy price on humanity, in everything from lives to liberty.

Even worse, the greater levels of equality this violence has ushered in, The Great Leveler relates, has never been sustainable. In instance after instance, inequality has always returned, often at even fiercer levels than before.

The good news? Scheidel essentially has none. On the one hand, “nobody in his or her right mind” welcomes violence. On the other, Scheidel sees no easy, peaceful, incremental route to more meaningfully equitable distributions of income and wealth.

“Business as usual may not be enough,” Scheidel cautions. “We have to think harder about how to bring change in today’s world.”

By change, Scheidel means greater equity, an outcome most people in the world today would likely consider worth pursuing. But not all people. In our contemporary unequal world, we have among us a number of folks who see nothing particularly wrong with grand concentrations of private wealth and power. These folks now seem to see Scheidel as an ideological godsend.

Scheidel hasn’t invited this bubbly appreciation from the right. The Great Leveler offers up no impassioned defense for maldistributions of income and wealth. Quite the opposite. Scheidel invites us to think deeply about inequality and come up with something “innovative and original” enough to “create lasting change.” The conservatives now celebrating Scheidel’s book don’t want us thinking at all about “lasting change.” They want us to simply accept our current maldistributions as inevitable and irreversible.

Only “bloody suffering,” as the Cato Institute’s Ryan Bourne puts it, ever produces more equality, and that equality “comes at too high a cost.” So let’s simply instead “accept the historical facts” that Scheidel gives us, he counsels, and abandon “equality as a central ambition.”

For fans of grand fortune like Bourne, the notion “that more equality generally is necessarily better” amounts to a silly “value judgment” that “should surely be put to bed by the long sweep of history.”

We need not, in other words, make any moves that challenge our top-heavy world economic order. We don’t need, Bourne believes, “much higher minimum wages” or “unionization” or “punitive income tax rates” on our wealthiest. Just keep government at bay and let the market work its magic.

And if we do, the Cato Institute analyst assures us, “our modern, dynamic world” economy will surely bring us “opportunities to continue to alleviate poverty.” A rising tide will lift all boats. So what if the income gap widens. That widening, “absent violence,” will always be with us.

George Will, America’s prime gatekeeper to conservative orthodoxy, fully shares Bourne’s gratitude for The Great Leveler’s take on inequality’s history. His write-up on the book, published earlier this month in the conservative National Review, carries a headline that neatly sums up how the right is reading Scheidel: “The most potent ‘solutions’ for inequality are unpleasant.”

The quote marks around “solutions” subtly carry their own message: We don’t need to “solve” inequality because inequality poses no problem that should give a civilized society pause.

Will goes on to not so subtly amplify that same message in the text of his contemplation over what Sheidel has wrought. Inequality surely rates as a fact, Will contends, but inequality only rates as “a problem when, and to the extent that, a critical mass of people decide that it is.”

This claim from Will will not go down well with the legions of social scientists who’ve spent recent decades researching and revealing the many social ills that inequality creates and nurtures. Wide divides between the rich and everyone else, these researchers have shown, are ripping safety nets and degrading our environment, subverting democratic norms and eroding our economy.

Maldistributions of income and wealth, epidemiologists inform us, are even limiting how long we live. And what about violence? Some 40 studies link inequality and homicides, the ultimate in violent acts. The wider a society’s inequality, the higher the murder rate.

Yes, inequality does rate as a problem, a reality that you don’t have to be a social scientist to recognize. Every great religious tradition in the world frowns on maldistributions of wealth. We put ourselves and our societies at risk, our greatest thinkers have always recognized, if we let these maldistributions fester.

But do we have no choice in the matter? Is inequality, as the most dispiriting reading of Scheidel would imply, our inevitable natural order?

In fact, we certainly do have choices. Scheidel may know the historical literature on social cataclysms. But he has less familiarity with the debates over antidotes to inequality that have coursed — and continue to course — through movements for social change.

Activists today are exploring encouraging pathways to a New Economy that sustain both our planet and greater equality. The work of veteran activist scholar Gar Alperovitz stands as just one heartening example.

Walter Scheidel asks us to “think harder about how to bring change in today’s world.” In truth, we already are.

Sam Pizzigati is an associate fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump once described our country’s stratospheric CEO pay as “a total and complete joke.” He was right about that. The idea that the guys in the corner office are worth hundreds of times more than their employees does not pass the laugh test.

He was also right when he pointed his finger at cronies on corporate boards as a big part of the problem. “The CEO puts in all his friends,” Trump said. “And they get whatever they want you know because their friends love sitting on the board. That’s the system that we have and it’s a shame and it’s disgraceful.”

But where the president-elect is off base is in his suggestion that we can’t do anything about this disgrace. In reality, there are many ways policymakers could take responsible action to rein in executive excess. And huge numbers of Trump’s own voters want them to do so.

Shortly before the election, Lake Research Partners surveyed likely voters in four states that all wound up in Trump’s column (Florida, Pennsylvania, Missouri and Ohio) and found strong support for specific policy reforms aimed at cracking down on excessive executive pay and Wall Street greed.

Let kids be kids — that’s some of the most common parenting advice you’ll hear. But when it comes to letting them be kids outdoors, many parents take pause. According to one U.K. study, in fact, most kids spend less time outside than incarcerated adults. What a loss.

Every other summer when I was growing up, my family visited my great-grandmother’s ranch in the hills of northern California. A bounty of interesting and abandoned structures stood decrepit on this once bustling cattle farm, and it was all mine to discover.

I still remember searching for barn owls in the rafters of the old hay barn and relishing in the capture of the pudgiest bullfrog tadpoles from the dredger ponds. For what seemed like hours, I’d kneel on muddy knees as I earnestly tried to lure feral kittens out from under the front stoop of the farmhouse. Traveling through the fields alone, I was aware of the risk of startling rattlesnakes as I walked through thigh-high wildflowers, or the chance of meeting of an aggressive Angus bull. And the incessant buzz of wasps and hornets was never far away. Yet I was having the time of my life.

It was this faint whiff of danger that cemented my appreciation of nature and ultimately resulted in my choosing conservation education as my profession. Teetering on the edge of risk around the dangers of the ranch increased my attention to the world around me and elevated my respect for animals.

Of all the pressing problems facing our country, which one garners the concern of the biggest share of Americans? The growing gap between rich and poor.

More than half the country, new Pew Research Center polling confirms, considers growing economic inequality a serious national problem. No other issue elicits as much public concern.

Unfortunately, and somewhat predictably, deep partisan lines appear to divide this public unease over inequality. Seven in 10 Hillary Clinton supporters deem inequality a pressing issue. Just three in 10 Trump backers feel the same way.

So what are we to make of numbers like these? For starters, we need to remind ourselves that rising inequality remains indisputable fact. Study after study continues to detail how the rich get richer and the rest of us do not.

New York farm workers want the right to a day offMarketplace.orgThe marchers were trying to right what they see as a historical wrong. The labor laws we take for granted, like days off, were passed back in the 1930s, during the New Deal. As part of the backroom compromising necessary to get them through …and more »